Machine Learning and Marketing: A Systematic Literature Review

Even though machine learning (ML) applications are not novel, they have gained popularity partly due to the advance in computing processing. This study explores the adoption of ML methods in marketing applications through a bibliographic review of the period 2008–2022. In this period, the adoption of ML in marketing has grown significantly. This growth has been quite heterogeneous, varying from the use of classical methods such as artificial neural networks to hybrid methods that combine different techniques to improve results. Generally, maturity in the use of ML in marketing and increasing specialization in the type of problems that are solved were observed. Strikingly, the types of ML methods used to solve marketing problems vary wildly, including deep learning, supervised learning, reinforcement learning, unsupervised learning, and hybrid methods. Finally, we found that the main marketing problems solved with machine learning were related to consumer behavior, recommender systems, forecasting, marketing segmentation, and text analysis—content analysis.